


amber rain

by BlackSclera



Category: Bleach
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:21:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23229277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackSclera/pseuds/BlackSclera
Summary: "Liar," he wants to say. "I know you wish it’d been me instead of Mom."Sequel to "by the river".
Comments: 2
Kudos: 78





	amber rain

They mourned.

Yuzu and Karin cried, screamed their throats raw into their pillows and soaked through the cloth of Isshin’s shoulder until the skin under their eyes turned red and peeled. For weeks, they struggled to look Yuzu in the eyes. She looked too much like their mother – _warm autumn strands and gentle brown eyes_ \- and looking at her reminded them that she wasn’t coming back, that all that was left of them was three grieving children and a man.

Isshin tries his best. He reeked of alcohol and his bones stuck tightly to the skin of his face but he tries, smiles at the twins and places a gentle hand on Ichigo’s head, reassurances that belied the quiver in his smile and the empty look in his eyes spilling from his lips.

“It’s not your fault,” he tells him, “you didn’t ask for this to happen, Ichigo.”

“Nobody blames you for it. I’m sure your sisters understand.”

(Something rattles every time he hears those same words, like chains crawling to wrap around his neck, pulling him back and _under_. Cold water fills his lungs and it’s like he’s back under his mother’s cooling corpse, back under that dreadful rain that refused to leave him under the covers.

He sinks, sinks, _sinks_ and he smiles inwardly, sinister and wrong with too many teeth and flecks of gold swirling in his eyes.

_Liar,_ he wants to say, _I know you wish it’d been me instead of Mom._

And Isshin would pull away, something terrified in his eyes, something haunted and _guilty._ He would look human like that, so unbearably selfish and vulnerable, grief carving dark lines high above his cheeks and tracing the sockets of his skull. He’s mourning like the rest of them and he’s trying his best but _it isn’t enough_ because Yuzu has bandages around her fingers from trying to make it all work and Karin has scars on her wrists which she hides under her sleeves _._

Ichigo isn’t the only one who lost a mother. Isshin lost so much more.

But _he_ was the one to witness the way their mother’s chest burst outward in a mess of flesh and the way the life drained out of her eyes. _He_ was the one who felt the weight of her dead body pressing against the front of his chest for hours, rain and blood and mud pooling under his head until he could taste it on his tongue. It was _him_ who watched her run in front of the demon, arms outstretched, and it was _him_ who felt the splatter of blood on his skin, felt the carved-out hole sticking to his chest.

They lost _family_ but Ichigo lost himself.)

Ichigo bore it all in silence and pretended not to notice the way they looked at him when they think he isn’t paying attention. He endured the weight of Isshin’s hand, too heavy and too deliberate some nights when he’s had too much to drink, pretended like the way his father catches the side of his face with his fist when he tries to help him off the couch has no other meaning than drunken stumbling.

He endured while they mourned and he did everything that was expected of him as the firstborn, helping Yuzu with the housework and encouraging Karin to join the soccer club to keep her mind off of their mother’s death. Isshin eventually stops drinking, choosing to delegate most of his time in the family clinic and helping out the elderly.

Yuzu stops cutting her hair short. Karin makes it to the team. Isshin goes three years sober, looking lighter and more like the person they knew before Masaki’s death.

And Ichigo, Ichigo smiles at them during dinner, careful to hide the patches of discoloration coloring his too-thin body and the mess of fresh scars and scabbing wounds under his clothes. By the time morning comes, his injuries would be healed and he would be aching for another fight.

( _Yer pathetic,_ White would whisper.

But he would heal him, a thick white paste-like substance surging from his injuries to staunch the bleeding, pouring into the skin and mending him until not even a scratch is left. He would heal him until Ichigo is whole and unbroken and every bit nothing like he feels.

There is no evidence. No marking or scar to prove that he’d nearly died one too many times from half a bottle buried inches into his side or a fatal cut across his throat in an alley on the other side of town.

Nothing but the voice in his head and the flecks of yellow in his eyes.)


End file.
